Find Lawyers in Germany for Outsourcing

In short, Outsourcing means "using outside resources." The Cambridge dictionary defines it as: "A situation in which a company employs another organization to do some of its work, rather than using its own employees to do it." Next to E-commerce, digitalisation, and globalization, outsourcing is changing the production and distribution of products and services. 

From a geographic perspective, one can differentiate onshore, nearshore and offshore outsourcing. This means that, always looking from the eyes of the customer, using a provider that is providing the services and probably sitting – geographically speaking – close to the customer (onshore), near to the customer (nearshore), or in a geographic location far away from the customer (offshore). The further away the provider sits, the more complex the issues involving the Outsourcing can be (language, culture, legal, compliance, data protection, etc.), but the greater the advantages can be. 

There are various types of Outsourcings. In this respect attorneys have to offer a full range of skills relating to IT Outsourcing (infrastructure, software development, etc.), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Transformational Outsourcing, Partial Outsourcing, Full Outsourcing, Data Center Outsourcing, and Knowledge Process Outsourcing.

There are several advantages and risks Outsourcing attorneys have to keep in mind. The main advantages for Outsourcing are:

- cost (usually an outside provider can provide the services at a much lower price), 
- availability (multinational providers follow the sun when providing services by using locations all over the world), 
- innovation (providers can have more strength in bench on technical domain knowledge),
- focus on core competencies (by outsourcing certain tasks, customers can focus on core business competencies),
- lack of resources (customers sometimes simply do not have or do not want to build certain (IT) competencies).

The main risks in Outsourcing are:

- dependency (a customer somewhat becomes dependent on the expertise and knowledge of the provider),
- loss of control (a customer loses some degree of control over outsourced areas and data),
- data security and data protection (a customer might need to share company and personal data with the provider).

Lawyers in this practice area provide advice on of all these aspects. There are many issues that need to be addressed by Outsourcing attorneys before one can engage an outside company to provide critical services: tax, legal business, technical, strategic, and employee-related. Therefore, Outsourcing can only work if attorneys involve the top management of the customer and the top management of the provider from day one and throughout the entire Outsourcing transaction.